Culture

Legal marijuana was bound to bring in new ideas. Especially as the industry evolves, new and awesome ideas are undoubtedly going to pop up. With the introduction of the cannabis vending machines that are being installed in the state of Colorado, there is a new bed and breakfast idea that is also sure to take off as more people begin to find out about it.

The MaryJane Group Inc purchased a one-year lease with the owners of Adagio Bed and Breakfast. This new venture is the pilot project of a business like this and is thought to be the pioneer in the cannabis lodging industry. When someone checks in to the lodge, they will receive the package plan that will include unlimited food, drink, and of course, marijuana. The lodge will also have an onsite chef that will prepare gourmet foods for the guests that are cooking to order, as well as luxury transportation around the city of Denver.

The lodge and company will also help out growers that are in debt with financing as well as helping other marijuana related businesses. This is great and will hopefully shed positive light on the cannabis community, as small businesses helping other small businesses. In addition, the company states on their website that they offer cannabis related tours as well as a partnering with a marijuana friendly radio station.

There are other food establishments that have been working on incorporating food and weed in to one place. There is Hapa Sushi Grill & Sake Bar, which is located in both Denver and Boulder. They introduced the pairing of sushi and weed earlier this year. Although the bed & breakfast has no set open date, Joel C. Schneider, President of the company that is starting this venture, says that if successful, more of these marijuana friendly lodgings will be opened. It will be a great spot for cannabis tourism, especially those who are unfamiliar with the cannabis industry. It will hopefully be an extremely positive spotlight in the community!

One of my biggest pet peeves is when a marijuana reform opponent automatically assumes that because someone smokes marijuana that they are some lazy loser that lives in their parents basement. Not all marijuana consumers are lazy. Not all marijuana consumers live with their parents. In fact, most marijuana consumers are hardworking, responsible adults that just happen to choose a product that is safer to consume than alcohol.

According to a new poll released by YouGov.com, most Americans agree with me. According to the poll, “The latest research from YouGov shows that most Americans (59%) think that it is possible to occasionally smoke marijuana and still be a responsible adult, though 28% disagree.”

Do you consume marijuana? Are you a responsible adult? I have always felt that people that are lazy and unproductive are that way regardless of if they smoke marijuana, or really anything else. Lazy people are lazy. Unproductive people are unproductive. Marijuana consumption doesn’t add to that or take away from it. What do readers think?

Stereotyping marijuana consumers as being lazy bums has been a ‘go-to’ tactic for marijuana opponents for a long time. This form of propaganda has been successful for many decades, but those days are gone. Marijuana is mainstream, and people are more educated on the topic than ever before. Marijuana opponents know it, whether they want to admit it or not.

Both systems will work well in a marijuana garden. With the reservoir system, you’ll use horticultural clay pellets or pea-sized volcanic lava in plastic pots. The containers are put in a tray that contains a water-nutrient solution that is about one quarter of the height of the container. A container that is 10 inches high will have about one inch of soaking rock. A large portion of the medium stays above the waterline. Capillary action keeps the rock moist by drawing up water. All the clay pebbles in the container remain moist as long as water says in the reservoir.

As soon as the water-nutrient solution is added to the tray, plain unenriched water needs to be added to keep the water level and strength of the nutrient solution at equilibrium. As water evaporates, the concentration of nutrients rises. Adding water will lower it.

Most of the literature suggests that roots should not be sitting in water. There are two reasons why this is occasionally true. First, the sitting water might not have dissolved oxygen. The roots utilize oxygen and will incur diseases without it. Second, some mediums are incredibly dense and take up so much water that there isn’t any air left. The roots then suffer from a lack of oxygen. In a reservoir system, large air spaces are left in between pieces of clay pebbles or lava so that there is enough air and the roots can access the oxygen more easily. Download my free marijuana grow bible for more tips and tricks about growing marijuana.

Roots that grow into the water look different than those that grow above it. They won’t have the fine network of root hairs and are denser even in water that has been depleted of oxygen. Other roots appear to supply oxygen to the roots in the water.

Marijuana gardeners concerned about a lack of oxygen for the water roots can infuse the water with the gas with a small air-stone attached to an air pump. The column of rising bubbles moves the water around. A larger amount of the surface area contacts the air and absorbs oxygen while releasing CO2.

The never ending drip system also utilizes clay pellets or pea-sized lava in containers that are sitting in a tray that drains into a reservoir below. A pump supplies a constant gentle stream of water through the tubing to each container so that a wispy stream of water is always trickling over the stones. This system is rather easy, but it still promotes vigorous growth. Keeping the drain hole blocked with the tubing that raises the drain to the desired height makes for an easy combo constant drip/reservoir system. With this, the marijuana plants are receiving a constant stream of water and the water roots are given space in the reservoir.

On 4/20 this year, Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa will host a "wellness concert" at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. The concert's tag line is "Inhale. Exhale. Recharge," which surprised approximately nobody. The state of Colorado is probably thrilled. If you doubted the duo's expertise, here's a video of Wiz Khalifa, alone in a hot tub, rolling a massive joint:

Although Wiz and Snoop are about to consummate the relationship between marijuana and music, the substance and our sounds have been closely tied for centuries.

Musicians have often cited marijuana as key to their creative process. The first musician to make his marijuana use public was the grinning, gravel-voiced Louie Armstrong. He wrote in his autobiography that ganja or "gage," as he referred to it, was "a thousand times better than whiskey ... it's an assistant — a friend." More than half a century later, Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson, the man responsible for writing Rolling Stone's second most important album ever written, echoed Armstrong's notion of marijuana being an "assistant:" "Marijuana helped me write Pet Sounds."

The list of musicians who have praised the green goes on and on from there. Everyone from Bob Dylan, The Beatles, OutKast, Alanis Morissette, Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley celebrate the drug as a key creative tool.

But it turns out there's hard science to back up the claim. Marijuana actually does have a strange relationship to musical creativity.

Putting the dope in dopamine. THC in marijuana smoke causes the body to release elevated levels of dopamine. This is the hormone behind the signature placid calm and euphoria of a marijuana high. Most significantly for artists, dopamine can lower one's inhibitions and quiet the "inner editor," allowing thoughts to flow more freely. Numerous writers and artists have asserted that scrutinizing every idea as lands on the page is a great way to short circuit one's creative output. So, for anxious musicians like Brian Williams, the ability to switch off self-consciousness while preserving self-awareness is huge.

Opening up. Few studies exist connecting marijuana and music explicitly, so many of these connections are still left to speculation. In his frequently quoted treatise on marijuana and musical faculties, "Marijuana and Music: A Speculative Exploration," earth scientist Peter Webster claimed the most remarkable effect of marijuana is a greatly enhanced appreciation of musical stimuli.

"The effect seems to be almost universal," he wrote, "and does not fade with experience." He noticed that during "cannabis sessions," people who loved pop music became fascinated by more complex, artful sounds, while people who had previously rejected pop music as "crude and trivial" came to appreciate it more through "cannabis consciousness." This means, then, that artists can have more powerful gut reactions to their own output, enabling them to make stronger creative decisions.

As for listening to pop music, feel free to use this to perform your own scientific study with the following control:

Divergent thought. The biggest claim about marijuana and creativity is also the most hotly debated. Researchers at the University College London found in 2010 that marijuana heightens the brain's automatic semantic priming abilities — or the ability to draw connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. That ability is known as divergent thought, and it's the holy grail of creativity, our best guess at what actually makes a person creative. A study performed by researchers at Temple University found a direct correlation between self-reported frequency of marijuana use and scores on creativity and "adventuresomeness" tests. The higher the frequency of use, the higher the subjects' scores.

But there also are a number of earlier studies that assert the exact opposite. Without getting into all the nitty gritty of experimental design, a lot of the arguments over the validity of divergent thinking tests like these come down to what researchers consider to be "coherent" and "divergent" responses.

Marijuana cuttings will naturally root rather quickly if they are kept in perfect conditions and are prepared correctly. They don’t have any roots, so their ability to get and maintain water is limited. In order to avoid a water shortage (a cause of wilting and, ultimately, death), you need to trim your plants well. The cuttings need to be 3 to 5 inches tall, and you should remove all leaves except for those in the crown. Those leaves should be trimmed to 1 or 1.5 inches in diameter.

Keeping both the roots and tops at a temperature of 72 to 74*F is ideal. That along with high humidity, moist rooting medium, and moderate light intensity that’s high in the blue spectrum will encourage faster root growth. To begin, trim the cuttings. You may have heard that you can’t cut them with scissors or that they must be cut underwater, but that’s not true; you can use scissors.

Then, line up according to their crowns in groups of 10, and then cut the ends of the stems so that everything is equal in height. Dip them in a rooting solution or gel and then quickly place them in a sterile planting medium in 1.5- to 2-inch square pots or 1.5-inch square Oasis or rockwool cubes. Download my free marijuana grow bible for tips about making marijuana clones.

Keep the marijuana cuttings in a tray and ensure moisture with a clear plastic top. If the surface of the shelf is cold, you can insulate the tray with a Styrofoam sheet so that the temperature of the medium remains consistent with the surrounding air. If the temperature of the air itself is low, you may need to use a horticultural heating mat. When three days have passed, remove the top and irrigate the plants with a watering can.

Add hydrogen peroxide at a strength of 0.5%. The first watering should be unfertilized, but the second and third waterings need to have a flowering formula like 15-30-15 or 5-8-3 or something else that has a high phosphorous concentration (the middle number indicates the percentage of phosphorous) at 0.25-strength or a concentration of 400 parts per million (ppm). After that, start using a vegetative formula like 18-18-21 or 16-16-16 at normal strength.

Keep the garden lit up with 5,000 Kelvin fluorescent tubes like the GE Chroma or something similar. Keep about one tube per foot of width (e.g. a cloning space sized at 1′ x 4′ would be illuminated by a single 4-foot tube). If you’re using compact fluorescents, use only one 13-watt lamp per square foot.

After about 7 to 10 days, the roots should start showing. At that point, you should increase the concentration of the vegetative formula to 800 ppm. If you want to wait to plant the marijuana clones, keep the lights at 10 watts per square foot. Usually, the plants will grow slowly, but, to increase their rate of growth, you should add more lighting tubes (around two tubes per foot of width). After doing this for week, you should have plants with vigorous new vegetative growth.

As the nation marches further down the long but seemingly inevitable road of marijuana decriminalization and legalization, President Barack Obama just made things a lot easier. On Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Obama administration is ready to work with Congress to take marijuana off the federal government's list of the most dangerous drugs.

"We'd be more than glad to work with Congress if there is a desire to look at and reexamine how the drug is scheduled, as I said there is a great degree of expertise that exists in Congress," Holder said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing. "It is something that ultimately Congress would have to change, and I think that our administration would be glad to work with Congress if such a proposal were made."

This is a strong affirmation from an administration that seems to be increasingly moving towards a more lenient, if not open stance on marijuana legislation reform. Under the federal Controlled Substances Act, the attorney general has the authority to "remove any drug or other substance from the schedules if he finds that the drug or other substance does not meet the requirements for inclusion in any schedule." However, Holder didn't say that he would utilize this power and seems more interested in working together with interested members of Congress.

Working together. Luckily for Holder, it shouldn't be too difficult to find interested members of Congress. Though there is still a lively debate on the issue, numerous congressmen have indicated an interest in rescheduling marijuana. In February, 18 congressmen went as far as to send Obama a formal letter indicating their strong desire to reevaluate how the federal government treats marijuana. This came shortly after Obama told David Remnick in the New Yorker that he believes pot is no more dangerous than alcohol.